Brooklyn Bridge Project

About The Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge was built in the late 1800’s and was engineered by John A. Roebling, Washington A. Roebling, and Emily Warren Roebling. It is the first bridge to use pneumatic caissons and the first steel cable suspension bridge.

The Project

• Location-Manhattan, New York
• Goal-Long-Term monitoring the structural Health of the old masonry building on the Manhattan side of the bridge.
• System Integrator-Chandler Monitoring Systems Inc.
• Customer-University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
• Date-2 Phases: January and February 2009
• Instrumentation
  • (1) Micron Optics, sm130 Optical Sensing Interrogator
  • (1) Micron Optics, sp130 Sensing Processor Module
  • (1) Micron Optics, sm041-016 Sensor Channel Multiplexor
• Sensors
  • (7)Micron Optics, os4100 Temperature Compensation Sensors
  • (8) Fiber Sensing, Tilt Meters
  • (5) Accelerometers
  • (16) UIC Crack Sensors
  • (5) UIC Corner Sensors
• FBG Technology Benefit- Easy to use software and multiplex capabilities of sensors.

Masonry Buildings

The Brooklyn Bridge consists of large masonry buildings for support (figure 1). They are made of granite, concrete, stone, masonry and wood. These buildings are 125 years old and are beginning to show cracks from stress due to contouring and settling of the changing environment.(figure 2). Crack (figure 3) (figure 4) and corner sensors(figure 5) were installed to help monitor this. Also we installed accelerometers and tilt meters (figure 6). Tilt Meters are designed to measure small variations of angle towards the vertical without the need for temperature compensation. To monitor the activity of all these sensors we have installed an accurate and easy to use ENLIGHT Sensing Analysis Software (figure 7).

Figure 1

Figure2

Figure3

Figure4

Figure5

Figure6

Figure7